Blog: Street Fighter D&D 5E

Street Fighter D&D 5Eis a blog series featuring builds for characters from the Street Fighter video games in D&D 5th Edition built using rules from Mists of Akuma, an eastern fantasy noir steampunk campaign setting. Free PDFs from its Kickstarter campaign are located here and you can grab a copy from Storm Bunny Studios.

If there’s someone you’d like to see please let me know and I’ll move them up the queue! 😀

Street Fighter D&D 5E and You

All of the Street Fighter D&D 5E characters are built as PCs and for the most part aren’t quite as beefy as your average monster–those are built with extra defenses and the resources of the system keep most of those out of player’s hands. In some cases their magic items can bring things up to par (and indeed, PCs do get some of those) but even then a few lucky critical hits or a round of ambush with some concentrated fire can prove problematic.

With that in mind here are a few tips for making the most out of this cadre of characters!

Duels

Facing a Street Fighter off against only one character (or even two characters that are given the option to tap in and out or fight in succession) should result in a fairly even fight. In these cases in particular make sure to offer interesting terrain (like facing off on a battleship being bombarded) and environmental effects (such as the fires of the tea house the combat breaks out in) to keep the game exciting, potentially offering something for other party members to try and deal with.

Double Trouble

Two Street Fighters with Challenge Ratings equal to 2 + the average party level should be a formidable fight, especially if you fight dirty–and you should. The PCs are probably going to take one target down first and there’s no reason the Street Fighters won’t do the same!

Instinctive Fighters

When only one Street Fighter is taking on an entire party of PCs, the Street Fighter gains the following feature:

Instinctive Fighter. The Street Fighter gains the uncanny dodge feature (when an attacker they can see hits them with an attack, they can use their reaction to halve the attack’s damage against them) and evasion feature (when they are subjected to an effect that allows them to make a Dexterity saving throw to take only half damage, they instead take no damage if they succeed on the saving throw and only half damage if they fail) if they do not already have them.In addition, each round the Street Fighter gains a number of extra reactions equal to half the number of foes it is facing. A foe is any creature (PC, animal companion, intelligent mount, conjured elemental, etc.) able to cast a damaging spell or take the attack action against the Street Fighter.

But how often will a surprise duel or dual ambush really work in the same campaign? Isn’t there something cooler we can do with this big wonderful cast of iconic characters?Yes–yes there is–but first let’s consider how well they can be implemented into your game.

High Mobility

Most every one of these builds clocks in at a speed of 40 ft. or better, has the ability to Dash as a bonus action, and has great stats for jumping around. On top of that their ACs are fairly high and so long as you aren’t dealing with someone that has the Sentinel feat, they should be able to move into and out of cover or generally up and away from a mob of adventurers.

Low-Tech

One of the best things about the Street Fighter D&D 5E builds are the fact that nobody is toting guns or anything really beyond the ken of a standard game (be that in Mists of Akuma or a more medieval world). If you’ve got monks in your setting you can probably swing these NPCs without breaking immersion.

Spellcaster Nightmares

As far as I can tell for most games, an upper-level PC is going to be sporting several decent magic items and a barbarian, fighter, or other melee-focused character may well be on equal footing with a Street Fighter–making for great duels! When they go after a party of adventurers however, it’s definitely going to skew the fight in a more difficult direction if they target spellcasters first.

Well What Now, Buddy?

Afro Samurai is very obviously one of my favorite anime series and one of the things that endears me to it is the simple plot: The Headband of The One. If for some awful reason you have not seen it yet watch the whole thing (both of them!) but in a nutshell, possessing this headband makes you invincible to anyone but the person wearing the Headband of the Two. I wouldn’t recommend exactly that here but a lot of the Street Fighter D&D 5E NPCs are sporting a pretty dope magic item–and accruing these magic items for a greater objective sounds like it is definitely worth pursuing.

What should that objective be? Fighting a boss of course! For now I recommend delving into some mythology and reskinning an existing badass high CR monster, but in the days to come (post 20 perhaps?) I’ll post a BBEG final boss battle attainable only after the PCs have acquired enough of these sacred video game relics!

What about builds without a signature magic item?In these cases, impart some of that defeated or dying NPCs’ ki into an item cherished by a PC and grant them a neat (hopefully related) feature they can use between short or long rests (depending on its potency).

BUT WHO IS THIS BOSS?!? Youtell me!I know the character I’d pick but I want to hear what/who you glorious readers would like to see! Is it time to break out Goro? Should we cross the Guilty Gear threshold? Get crazy obscure? Comment on the post, hit me up on Facebook or Google+, or tweet at me with your vote!